Video-related traffic is the most significant portion of the total internet traffic and continues to grow rapidly. Among the different video delivery methods, HyperText Transfer Protocol—(HTTP-) based adaptive video streaming is becoming more and more popular due to its relative advantages. Compared with conventional streaming, HTTP streaming reuses high quality open source web server software rather than deploying new expensive proprietary streaming servers. Another benefit is that HTTP traffic is able to penetrate firewalls, and the content is also easy to distribute on the existing HTTP-based Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Examples of HTTP based adaptive streaming are Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Adobe Dynamic Streaming over HTTP or the recent MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard.
It is well known that sudden changes in communication network capacity (e.g., in mobile broadband networks due to handovers, mobility, fading, or other competing traffic) may cause re-buffering events for HTTP-based adaptive streaming. Current actions of media client adaptation to avoid re-buffering are to request a lower (e.g., the base) representation segment upon detecting a low rendering buffer and/or throughput of last segment download. Alternatively, the media client may decide to stop the current segment download, and request a lower (e.g., the base) representation. However, these actions may be too late to avoid media rendering freeze. Moreover, in case of aborting the download of a media segment, the downloaded fraction of the media segment is wasted.